Thursday, 12 March 2015

Saying Goodbye to Terry Pratchett

I was walking home when I saw the email. It was from Penguin
Random House and it began “It is with immeasurable sadness that we announce
that author Sir Terry Pratchett has died at the age of 66.”

I didn’t read any further then.

Terry is dead.

It’s funny. Sir Terry Pratchett wrote books a continent
away, and he was my friend. He was Terry. Not pterry, though I know that story.

It was 2000. I was in Hyderabad, and I was tripping on Harry
Potter. On the Potter newsgroups, I came upon a thread asking for
recommendations for other fantasy authors. Terry’s Discworld novels were the
most frequently mentioned. There were wizards, one poster said. And there was a
University full of them. Another recommended that the books be read in
chronological order, from The Colour Of
Magic on.

I bought The Colour Of Magic at a shop in Secunderabad. It
was near Kamat, if memory serves me well. I think it was the Book Selection
Centre. The shopkeeper had a shelf full of Pratchetts, and I thought, “That’s good.
If this series works out, there’s plenty of stuff for me to read.”

As it turns out, there wasn’t nearly enough, but that’s
another story.

I read TCOM. I was … underwhelmed. I could see that it was a
parody of existing fantasy literature – I caught the D & D references and
that Hrun was obviously Conan. I’d heard of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, though
I hadn’t read any Leiber. It was also obvious that Bel Shamharoth was
Lovecraftian. But I hadn’t read any Anne McCaffrey and only knew of
Stormbringer from Nethack. It seemed that the author was trying too hard.

It was still better than most other stuff I was reading
then. I bought The Light Fantastic a
couple of days later.

The book was better, but still not wow! Ymper Trymon was a satisfactory villain, and I was getting
used to the idea of a cowardly hero. And I loved Cohen the Barbarian,
especially the quote about the best things in life being “hot water, good
dentishtry and and shoft lavatory paper”.

I liked Equal Rites even
better. But it took me long time to realize that Pratchett’s books weren’t
always funny – not in the Wodehouse sense, which was what I had been expecting
at some level. There was serious trope deconstruction, which was always
good for a laugh, provided you understood the trope existed. But there was
always a kernel of commentary there – about people, about attitudes, and
traditions and ideology. And it always made me stop and think.

Take Guards, Guards – this
was still early on, when it’s Carrot who is the hero, and Vimes is still a
secondary figure, not the determinator-asskicker he would become with the
later books. But even here, there’s this: “Down there - he said - are people
who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any inequity. All out of a
kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness
of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin,
you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because
they say yes, but because they don't say no”

Or take the entirety of Small
Gods, one of thefinest
meditations on faith I’ve ever read. “Fear is a strange soil. It grows
obedience like corn, which grow in straight lines to make weeding easier. But
sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground.” Or “Every
five years someone was elected to be Tyrant, provided he could prove that he
was honest, intelligent, sensible, and trustworthy. Immediately after he was
elected, of course, it was obvious to everyone that he was a criminal madman
and totally out of touch with the view of the ordinary philosopher in the
street looking for a towel. And then five years later they elected another one
just like him, and really it was amazing how intelligent people kept on making
the same mistakes.”

Or this one:

““Humans! They lived in a world where the grass continued to
be green and the sun rose every day and flowers regularly turned into fruit,
and what impressed them? Weeping statues. And wine made out of water! A mere
quantum-mechanistic tunnel effect, that'd happen anyway if you were prepared to
wait zillions of years. As if the turning of sunlight into wine, by means of
vines and grapes and time and enzymes, wasn't a thousand times more impressive
and happened all the time”.

By the time I got to Small
Gods, I was hooked.

It wasn’t that all of Pratchett’s books were equal. There
was the early instalment weirdness – the Granny Weatherwax of Equal Rites is nowhere near the Granny
Weatherwax in Carpe Jugulum. Vimes in Guards
Guards is very different from the His Grace Sir Samuel in Snuff, character development
notwithstanding. I found Pyramids
weak among the early books. Among the later books, I’m not a fan of Monstrous Regiment or Snuff. But dear God, there were so many
fantastic books inbetween.

There was Night Watch,
my personal favourite – along with another book that I will come to in a
bit, which has this quote about people who want to change society:” People on
the side of The People always ended up dissapointed, in any case. They found
that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking
or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very
clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the
revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the
wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of
people. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure
up.”

Since he’s gone now, there won’t be any more lines like
this.

But Terry had Alzheimers. He was failing. He wanted to rid
himself of his embuggerance by drinking a Brompton cocktail and “with Thomas
Tallis on my iPod, I would shake hands with Death.”

He didn’t need the cocktail.

The other favourite book is Reaper Man, where Death comes to
terms with his own mortality – while Windle Poons, Unseen University’s oldest
wizard hasn’t died properly. After the adventure is over and Death is restored,
he comes for Poons, who has been quite busy living in his un-life.

Poons and Death have a brief conversation.

Poons says “One lifetime isn’t enough”

Death says “OH, I DON’T KNOW. THAT WAS YOUR LIFE”

“And, with great relief, and general optimism, and a feeling
that everything could have been much worse, Windle Poons died”

I can see something similar playing out when Death came for
Terry earlier today.

He was always angry. His best characters were angry. His
characters were at their best when they were angry.

I don’t want to say “I hope he has no more need for that
anger”.

I will miss the anger.

I will miss him.

I will miss the fact that I don’t know what the patrician
will do to get Moist Von Lipwig to sort out the problem of tax collection in
Ankh Morpork.

I don’t know how Salacia Von Humpeding will shape up in the
watch

I don’t know what Tiffany Aching will grow up to be

But it’s OK.

There’s enough stuff
in his existing books to keep me happy for a long long time.